The name Iphianassa occurs only once in Latin literature—in the proem to De Rerum Natura (= DRN). Here Lucretius illustrates the evils of religion with a description of Iphianassa's sacrifice at Aulis (1.80–101):

It is clear that Lucretius treats the name Iphianassa as a synonym for Iphigenia. Homer (Il. 9.145, 9.287) and Sophocles (El. 157) mention a daughter of Agamemnon called Iphianassa, but in neither author is she the daughter who was sacrificed at Aulis (and in several versions rescued at the last moment by Artemis).Footnote ¹ The first known mention of this myth was in the Cypria, where, according to the summary of Proclus, the daughter was called Iphigenia (Kinkel, EGF 19; Bernabé, PEG 1.41). Hesiod refers to it in the Catalogue of Women, where he calls the daughter Iphimede (Cat. fr. 23a.15–26 + b M-W).Footnote ² From the fifth century b.c.e., the extant sources, beginning with Pindar (Pyth. 11.22) and Aeschylus (Ag. 1526, 1555), call her Iphigenia.Footnote ³ Why did Lucretius choose Iphianassa?

A brief history of the name is in order, setting aside its application to other mythical women. The Iliad mentions three daughters of Agamemnon: Chrysothemis, Laodice and Iphianassa.Footnote ⁴ Agamemnon himself lists them when he attempts to placate Achilles by offering him the hand of one of his daughters, together with other rewards. The line appears twice, first when Agamemnon announces the proposal to the Greeks in council (Il. 9.141–8):

Odysseus repeats it, in a slightly adapted form, when he reports the offer to Achilles (Il. 9.283–90).

Homer does not mention Electra or Iphigenia. According to the D scholiast, Laodice is identical with the daughter whom the tragedians called Electra and Iphianassa with Euripides’ Iphigenia.Footnote ⁵ This accords with Euripides’ list of three daughters named Chrysothemis, Iphigenia and Electra (Or. 23). The case for Iphianassa and Iphigenia being variant names for the same person is supported by Hesiod's reference to Iphimede, the prefix Iphi- being common to all three names.Footnote ⁶ On the other hand, the L scholiast on Soph. El. 157 (= Cypria fr. 24 Bernabé) states that the Cypria recognized four daughters and distinguished between Iphigenia and Iphianassa.Footnote ⁷ If Homer's Iphianassa is the same as Iphigenia, he was either unaware of or rejected the myth of her sacrifice at Aulis.Footnote ⁸ If she is distinct from Iphigenia, Homer may have known the myth but refrained from mentioning it.Footnote ⁹ The only other reference to Agamemnon's Iphianassa, outside Homer and Lucretius, is in Sophocles’ Electra, where the chorus comment upon Electra's excessive display of grief in comparison to her siblings (El. 153–63):

This Iphianassa is distinct from Iphigenia, for elsewhere in the play Sophocles refers to the daughter who was sacrificed (563–76). Although he does not state her name, she must be Iphigenia.Footnote ¹⁰

To sum up, the number and the nomenclature of Agamemnon's daughters—especially the name of the daughter who was sacrificed—seem to have been fluid during the Archaic period, but by the fifth century the name of Iphigenia for the sacrificed daughter was canonical and has remained so ever since. As a daughter of Agamemnon, Iphianassa appears in Homer and Sophocles but not again until Lucretius—and never thereafter. In contrast to the early Greek tradition, there is no evidence of variation in Latin literature. Both Naevius and Ennius wrote tragedies titled Iphigenia, of which some fragments survive.Footnote ¹¹ The name Iphigenia appears in a quotation—or paraphrase—from Cato's Origines (fr. 71 Peter; fr. 45 FRH). Cicero mentions Iphigenia three times (Orat. 74; Off. 3.95; Tusc. 1.116) as well as Ennius' play of that name (Rep. 1.30).Footnote ¹² That is her name in Ovid (Met. 12.31; Pont. 3.2.62; Tr. 4.4.80) and later authors. Lucretius is the sole exception.

The evidence points to two conclusions. First, in the first century b.c.e. there was not a living tradition of uncertainty about the name of Agamemnon's sacrificed daughter such as would have allowed Lucretius the room to make an arbitrary and unremarkable choice in favour of Iphianassa over Iphigenia. Second, his choice is most likely to have been based on Homer. Lloyd-Jones opines that ‘Lucretius’ use of the name Iphianassa may well indicate that some Greek poet gave that name to the daughter who was sacrificed’Footnote ¹³—meaning some poet other than Homer. A poet like Callimachus, perhaps? It cannot be ruled out, though one might expect such a striking departure from tradition to have drawn comment. Nor can we be certain that a prior Roman poet had not used Iphianassa. If so, we can probably rule out Ennius and Naevius, who, according to the testimonia, called their plays Iphigenia. But might Accius or Pacuvius, for example, have used the name Iphianassa in a play such as the latter's Chryses, some lines of which were imitated by Lucretius (5.318–23),Footnote ¹⁴ and which presumably featured Orestes, Pylades and Iphigenia?Footnote ¹⁵ I find it unlikely, but even if Lucretius had a precedent, he must have known that the name derived ultimately from Homer. This is the thing of most significance, not whether Lucretius was the first to use Iphianassa as an alternative name for Iphigenia. The description of Iphianassa's sacrifice is dense with literary allusions, drawing as it does on the parodos of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon,Footnote ¹⁶ the Iphigenia in Aulis of EuripidesFootnote ¹⁷ and the Andromacha of Ennius.Footnote ¹⁸ Its complex intertextuality, as well as its central importance within the proem to De Rerum Natura,Footnote ¹⁹ suggest that the use of the name Iphianassa was a considered choice intended to evoke Homer, not an arbitrary one prompted by the anomalous usage of this or that Hellenistic or Roman poet.

What motivated this choice? The reason was not metrical, for Lucretius could equally well have written Iphigeniai.Footnote ²⁰ This sounds, to a modern ear at least, harsher than Iphianassai, so the desire for euphony may have played a part.Footnote ²¹ On the other hand, a harsh tone would not be unsuited to the bitter theme,Footnote ²² and had Lucretius written Iphigeniai, we might find ourselves admiring the expressive accumulation of guttural and nasal sounds (uirginis … Iphigeniai … sanguine). From another perspective, the Homeric word, Iphianassa, may be viewed as an archaism that enhances the epical-tragic style of the passage.Footnote ²³ But it is doubtful whether aesthetic considerations alone could justify a dramatic departure from the ordinary nomenclature, especially since Iphigenia was the name used in the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides to which Lucretius demonstrably alludes.

If euphony was not the determining factor, perhaps there were associations of the name Iphigenia that Lucretius wished to avoid. A strong tradition held that Iphigenia did not die at Aulis but was saved by Artemis and attained priestly, heroic or immortal status.Footnote ²⁴ As a priestess in Tauris, for example, the Euripidean Iphigenia is a mature and resourceful heroine—far from the helpless victim who was lured to Aulis. Lucretius perhaps prefers an alternative Homeric name, unencumbered by cultic associations, which restores the ‘vulnerable pre-tragic pathos’ of her pristine identity as a young marriageable maiden (Il. 9.145).Footnote ²⁵ The freshness of the name may have appealed to Lucretius, but seems insufficient by itself to account for such a conspicuous departure from tradition. No educated reader, after all, could doubt for a moment that Lucretius is referring to Iphigenia, and this realization opens the door to all the associations of the latter name. Lucretius, however, nullifies any thoughts of her miraculous rescue or subsequent religious identity by his prefatory attack on religio (1.62–79), his polemical introduction to the myth (1.80–3), and his sad and realistic description of the sacrifice itself.

What makes the choice so surprising, of course, is not just the rare and archaic name but the fact that it involves a contradiction of Homer. Homer's Iphianassa was alive in the last year of the Trojan War; the Iphianassa of Lucretius was sacrificed at its outset to placate Artemis and secure a favourable voyage for the Greek fleet. If, as seems most likely, Lucretius took the name from Homer, we must suppose one of three things: that Lucretius was confused by the similarity of the names or misled by some other source and failed to notice the contradiction;Footnote ²⁶ that he noticed it but ignored it, placing an aesthetic preference before consistency; or, as I will argue, that he noticed and embraced it to expose and correct Homer's omission of the sacrifice.

My interpretation dovetails with Taylor's recent analysis of Lucretius’ tragic sources in this passage. As shown by Perutelli,Footnote ²⁷ Lucretius adheres closely to Aeschylus’ version of the story, which describes the brutal killing of Iphigenia and thus implicitly rejects competing versions of her rescue by Artemis through the substitution of another victim, such as those found in the Cypria, Hesiod's Catalogue of Women and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (at least in its interpolated form).Footnote ²⁸ Yet, in addition to Agamemnon, Lucretius alludes to this very play.Footnote ²⁹ By combining incompatible versions in such a way as to endorse the account of Aeschylus, Lucretius, according to Taylor, offers the reader a model for choosing between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ versions when faced with variations in the mythic tradition. In his words, ‘[t]he Euripidean lines are removed from their potentially problematic source and inserted into a univocal, fully rationalized discursive environment—DRN—where no room is left for the possibility of divine intervention. The irrational “Euripidean” account is thus corrected in the mind of the reader.’Footnote ³⁰ So too, I suggest, in the case of Iphianassa. The name is taken from a context that implies that the sacrifice of Iphigenia never happened and is inserted into an environment that insists on its historical reality. Moreover, the new environment corrects not only Homer's ignorance or neglect of the sacrifice itself but his representation of Agamemnon's offer of one of his daughters to Achilles. In Lucretius’ version, Iphigenia is brought to Aulis in the expectation of being married—to Achilles, of course, though he and Agamemnon are not named.Footnote ³¹ Euripides did not invent this story, but its fullest extant expression, and Lucretius’ probable inspiration, was Iphigenia at Aulis.Footnote ³² Lucretius therefore both rejects and endorses different aspects of the Euripidean play. He rejects its version of the substitute sacrificial victim but endorses its depiction of Iphigenia's cruel deception and thereby discredits Homer's notion of an innocuous and reconciliatory union between Iphianassa (or another daughter) and Achilles. Seen in this light, the name Iphianassa has a sarcastic edge. Formally, it elevates the style but its implications indict the truthfulness of Homer.

Lucretius’ attitude to Homer, as to Ennius and Empedocles, is a mixture of poetic admiration and philosophical censure.Footnote ³³ Homer is ‘ever-flowering’ (1.124, semper florentis Homeri), the one and only lord of poets (3.1037–8). Ennius was the first Italian to win poetic fame (1.117–19) by his ‘eternal verses’ (1.121, aeternis … uersibus).Footnote ³⁴ The poems of Empedocles’ ‘divine mind’ (1.731, diuini pectoris) make him seem hardly mortal (1.733). But all three are deficient in truth, as revealed by Epicurus. Empedocles is fundamentally mistaken about the basic constituents of the world (1.740–1). Ennius, a self-proclaimed reincarnation of Homer, proclaims a false theory of survival after death (1.120–3), presumably related to him by Homer himself when he appeared to Ennius in a dream and began to expound the nature of things (1.124–6). As for Homer, it is hardly an exaggeration to call De Rerum Natura a sustained attack on his entire poetic world, with its meddlesome and vindictive gods, superstitions, priests and prophets, celebration of military prowess, supernatural monsters, delight in material possessions, and belief in the afterlife. Beginning with his grandiloquent invocation of the Trojan myth and Roman history (Aeneadum genetrix) and his reminiscences of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (in the depiction of Venus’ sway over birds, beasts and humans), Lucretius commandeers the Homeric manner. But right away he redirects its function from mythical narrative to philosophical exposition, as, for example, in his allegorical interpretation of the story of Venus and Mars, which harks back to the risqué tale of Demodocus in the Odyssey.

Lucretius’ engagement with specific passages of the Homeric epics is far less extensive than Virgil's, but there are a number of echoes that reveal his attitude. In his study of what he calls Lucretius’ ‘revisions’ of Homer, Aicher states that ‘they range from a very limited engagement of their Homeric context to a clearly polemical correction of it’.Footnote ³⁵ The latter are the most relevant to my own argument. They include Lucretius’ disapproving allusions to the luxurious palace of Alcinous (2.24–8), his allegorization of the underworld figures of Tityos (3.984–94) and Sisyphus (3.995–1002), and his mockery of the monster Chimaera (5.901–6). In these passages Lucretius at once evokes and undermines a Homeric model. But, as Aicher shows, even the less–focussed Homeric allusions tend to contain corrective elements, whether of a demythologizing or of a moralizing character. This is true, for example, of Lucretius’ longest adaptation of Homer, the passage in the proem to Book 3 that is based on Homer's description of Mt Olympus (3.18–24; cf. Od. 6.42–5). What in Homer is a specific geographic location associated with anthropomorphic gods and marked by a supernatural invulnerability to ordinary weather is freed in Lucretius of its associations with Olympian gods and turned into a distant vision of divine tranquillity that may serve as a model for the joy and the peace of mind attainable by those who accept the teachings of Epicurus.

By choosing the name Iphianassa Lucretius contradicts the implication of the Iliad (9.145) that the sacrifice of Iphigenia never took place. Whether or not Homer knew the myth and whether or not Lucretius thought he did is unimportant. The main point is that Lucretius (perhaps following a scholiast) took Homer's Iphianassa to be the same as Iphigenia and objected to the erasure of a notorious event that was almost universally acknowledged in post-Homeric accounts of the Trojan myth and that rightly belonged to the beginning of the Trojan narrative. Homer alludes to events at Aulis in Book 2 of the Iliad, but, through ignorance or choice, ignores the sacrifice. Lucretius corrects this omission by reinstating the sacrifice of Iphianassa at the beginning of his own epic, where it serves, however, not to launch a heroic narrative but to indict and discredit the religious underpinnings of the heroic tradition.

By asserting the reality of the sacrifice in the face of Homer's silence, Lucretius not only delivers a strike against religion but undermines the Homeric model of heroism. As he has just asserted (1.62–79), it is a simply described ‘Greek man’ (Graius homo, 66)—the philosopher Epicurus—who is the real hero of humanity, not a legendary warrior decked out with bombastic epithets, like the ductores Danaum delecti, ironically acclaimed as prima uirorum (1.86), who are responsible for the sacrifice of Iphianassa, or like Hercules, whose accomplishments are belittled in the proem to Book 5 (5.1–54). Warfare, along with the pursuit of wealth and political power, appears throughout De Rerum Natura as a prime example of human folly, not glorious achievement. Consistently, Lucretius displays a sardonic attitude toward the Trojan War. In Book 5, he asks why it is, if the world is eternal and had no birth, that other poets have not recorded events ‘beyond the Theban War and the destruction of Troy’ (5.324–31):Footnote ³⁶

The Theban and Trojan Wars owe their dominant place in legend not to their unique greatness and glory but to the relatively short length of human history. The belittling effect is underlined with sarcasm, through the unheroic emphasis on the ruin of Troy (5.326, funera Troiae) and the double-edged reference to ‘eternal monuments of fame’ (5.329, aeternis famae monimentis), which, on the one hand, pays tribute to the genius of Homer and, on the other, points up the futility of ‘eternal’ aspirations in a world that had a beginning and will have an end.Footnote ³⁷ Nothing except atoms and void and the universe itself is eternal (5.351–63). Poetry is eternal only in the reduced sense of ‘as long as the world lasts’.Footnote ³⁸

A similar irony pervades the summary of the Trojan myth that Lucretius folds into his discussion of properties and accidents in Book 1 (1.464–82):

As in Book 5, the effect is to diminish the majesty of the Trojan myth, which is dethroned from the status of ‘being’ to a subsidiary and temporary sort of existence contingent upon the configurations of matter and void. Only the latter are eternal; human history (1.478, res gestas) is evanescent, and, by implication, De Rerum Natura gives a deeper and truer account of the world than the Iliad.Footnote ³⁹ To summarize the events of the Trojan War, Lucretius adopts an appropriately epical-tragic style that evokes its traditional grandeur and historical remoteness.Footnote ⁴⁰ Its heightened features include the patronymic Tyndaris (1.464, 473);Footnote ⁴¹ the circumlocutory compounds ‘Troy-born peoples’ (1.465) and ‘the Greek-born’ (1.477); the elaborate metaphors of fire and parturition (1.473–7); the name of Alexander for Paris and the hypallage ‘Alexander's Phrygian heart’ (1.474); the Greek-based hapax legomenon durateus (1.476); and the archaic nominative equos (1.477). Some of these features are Homeric, whether derived from Homer directly or via Ennius. For instance, durateus … equos translates ἵππος δουράτεος in the Odyssey (8.492–3, 8.512); Alexander is Homer's favoured name for the person more often known as Paris in Latin literature;Footnote ⁴² and Pergama, as a name for Troy, goes back to Homer.Footnote ⁴³ But, as in the description of Iphianassa's sacrifice, the tension between the elevated style and the author's sceptical attitude toward heroic myth gives rise to irony. In sum, the effect of the Homeric-Ennian manner in the context of an argument expounded in Lucretius’ plain argumentative style is to contrast hyperbolical poetic treatments of the Trojan War with his own sober philosophical analysis.

Lucretius requisitions the content and the style of tragic and epic poetry to subvert the foundations of the world it represents. In this regard, of course, the heroic world stands proxy for his own society. Lucretius’ real aim is not to debunk the imaginary world of Homer but the false values of contemporary Rome. The world of myth offered a storehouse of dramatic time-tested stories of universal significance. And with it came a majestic poetic style, inherited from Homer, the Athenian tragedians and their Roman imitators. Lucretius adapted these tools to his own purpose of demythologizing the world—of striking off the shackles of error in all its inherited forms and replacing it with the empowering knowledge of the Epicurean truth.

The sacrifice of Iphigenia, allegedly demanded by a goddess and perpetrated to advance a destructive war of retribution that is utterly out of proportion to its cause, epitomizes for Lucretius the evils of a belief system that warps the mind with worldly ambition and fear of the gods. Having placed before us an enticing vision of peace, pleasure, and philosophical enlightenment (l.1–79), Lucretius reverts to the ugly reality of human behaviour. The works of Venus and her triumph over Mars give way to a cruel perversion of the marriage-ritual in aid of martial glory; the intellectual heroism of Epicurus yields to the brutality of selfish warriors. Lucretius had noticed and resented Homer's ignorance or suppression of Iphigenia's horrific sacrifice. He corrects this omission by bringing the story to the forefront of his own epic and stripping it of all redeeming features. And he flags his correction by substituting for Iphigenia not, like Artemis, a deer or a bear but the name of Iphianassa.